Sunday, April 1, 2007

Today Was a Day to Doubt Your Senses

April Fools Day in the internet age is a challenge. There are always any number of goofs out there on April 1; some subtle, some stupid, some sublime. But for those of us who wander the wide world web, the sheer volume of silliness can become overwhelming.

Google got into the act, of course, offering a toilet-enabled WiFi system and a de-evolutionary new way to archive e-mail.

The Delaware News Journal tongue-in-cheekily suggested a second chance for recently disgraced state lawmaker John Atkins.

A local Liberal false-outed a local Conservative.

On MetaFilter, the moderators crafted a special April-Fools' version of Ask MetaFilter (somewhat NC17) that collected a month's worth of fictional nightmare questions.

Technorati played anagrams with its own name.

And Flickr Scout told me that all 2,389 of my posted photos had placed in Flickr's vaunted Explore list of the most "interesting" shots posted. My little heart went pitter-patter; previously I'd only placed three in Explore.

There were hundreds more, of course. For all that, the most disconcerting Foolishness today was unintentional.

Karen had planned to head-out early today. The Bell Choir played early- and late-morning services at Epworth Church. I was planning to be up and around in time to get Colleen to church by 9:30.

But when I awoke and looked at the clock, I was horrified to see that it was already 8:30. I scrambled out of bed, woke Colleen the ungentle way, and leapt into the shower. When I came downstairs half an hour later, ready to drive her into town, Colleen was still in her PJs; she pointed to two clocks that both read 8:00. I had panicked and got us all up too early.

When I checked with Karen later, I learned that she had also been fooled and got up way too early.

Our fancy alarm clock is programmed to reset itself when power goes out. It also helpfully resets itself to account for Daylight Savings Time changes. Unfortunately, when Congress moved the spring-forward date up by a few weeks and away from April 1, they neglected to inform our alarm clock.

So. Early this morning, while we were deeply asleep, our clock stirred itself and sprang it's digital read-out ahead from 2:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m., placing Karen and I an hour ahead of the day.

We were fooled. Who says Congress has no sense of humor?

1 comment:

Evil Spock said...

I changed The Needs of the Few into The Needs of the Redshirt, and had someone post 24 blogs in 24 hours.

Some of the regulars were quite perplexed.

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